Builder confidence in this country is sitting on the floor. The Prairie region is the exception, and the size of that exception deserves a longer look than it will get.
The Canadian Home Builders’ Association released its first quarter reading yesterday. Single family confidence in the Prairie region landed at 38.6. Ontario came in at 10.2. British Columbia came in at 5.8. Same survey, same quarter, same question put to builders who all buy lumber in the same currency.
Close to four times Ontario. Somewhere between six and seven times British Columbia.
One caution before anybody paints that on a billboard. The Prairie figure covers three provinces, not one. Alberta is inside it. Alberta is not alone in it, and any builder who tells you otherwise is selling something.
The national floor is the real story
National single family confidence came in at 20.9. That is down 5.5 points from a year ago and sitting 1.3 points above the lowest reading ever recorded. The multi-family number was 13.4, which is now the third record low in a row.
Three consecutive record lows is not a bad quarter. That is a floor that keeps giving way underneath the people standing on it.
In late January the same survey put the fourth quarter of 2025 at 19.6 on single family, the lowest ever recorded to that point, with multi-family at 14.7 and down 7.3 points year over year. The Prairie provinces posted their first negative single family reading in two years in that same quarter. So nobody out here is claiming a boom, and nobody should.
The claim is narrower and much harder to argue with. Confidence in the Prairies is bruised. Everywhere else it is flat on the canvas.
Atlantic Canada, to be fair about it, scored higher than the Prairies at 43.5. Two regions still have builders willing to say the next stretch looks workable. Neither one is Ontario or British Columbia.
The apartment numbers are worse
Multi-family is where the spread stops being a statistic and starts being an indictment. Prairie region multi-family confidence sat at 37.6. British Columbia managed 13.9. Ontario posted 3.8.
Three point eight. On a scale that runs to a hundred.
Prairie builders run close to ten times that number on the identical question. Ontario has spent years explaining to the rest of the country how a housing shortage gets solved, and its own builders have effectively stopped believing in apartment construction. Interest rates apply coast to coast, so that spread is a verdict on what it costs, and how long it takes, to get an apartment approved and finished in that particular policy environment.
Sentiment turns into paycheques
Confidence surveys read like weather reports until you reach the employment line.
47% of builders nationally said that they or their subcontractors had laid people off. In Ontario the figure was 65%. Two out of every three Ontario builders cutting crews in a single quarter.
The January release, covering the previous quarter, put national layoffs at 38%. So the share of builders shedding workers climbed nine points in three months. That is the number that turns into a framer looking for work, a plumbing outfit parking a truck, an apprentice deciding the trade is not worth finishing.
Crews that leave the trade do not come back the week the market turns. They come back years late, or not at all, and everything built in the meantime costs more because of it.
The kind of house that stopped getting built
Underneath the regional scoreboard sits a change that could carry a headline on its own. Ownership housing has gone from roughly 70% of Canadian starts in 2021 to below 50% now.
In five years this country cut nearly in half the share of its construction going to homes a family can actually buy. Nobody announced it. It happened one program and one financing decision at a time, in rooms a long way from the province absorbing the population surge, and the association led by Kevin Lee kept publishing the arithmetic for anyone who cared to read it.
There is a reasonable case that the regional spread and the ownership collapse are the same story viewed from two angles. Where ownership housing still gets approved and delivered on a timeline a business can survive, builders stay willing to start. Where it does not, they stop.
Alberta already runs a 120-day approval timeline. Now it sits inside the only region west of the Maritimes where builders will still put shovels in dirt at scale. Those two facts are related, and neither one is an accident.
Confidence is a soft measure right up until it decides whether a lot gets serviced, whether a crew stays together, whether a subdivision opens in 2027 or waits for 2030. On that measure the Prairie region carries more of this country’s homebuilding will than its population gets credit for.
The rest of the country has a policy problem. The first quarter numbers just published the receipt.
Should Alberta be actively recruiting the crews Ontario is laying off, or leave other provinces to fix the supply problems they built?
